The Differential City ***** Exposure, Familiarity and Restorative Choice (Spokane, Samuelsson, Urrutia, Zhang, Cheng, Christensen, Liu, Tu, Bryer) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A city acts on its inhabitants less as a stable container than as a succession of unequal exposures. Streets, squares, routes, greenery, façades, shade, services and social intensities do not operate separately; they form a variable field through which bodies move, attention is allocated, familiarity accumulates and recovery becomes more or less possible. This shifts the problem of urban well-being away from the search for a universally optimal environment. Spokane et al. make the first decisive move by disaggregating the streetscape to lot and block level: health-relevant urban form becomes legible only when measurement descends below the scale of generic neighbourhood indicators and identifies the physical features through which social processes can occur. Urrutia del Campo reaches a parallel conclusion from Madrid’s public squares. 

Embodied Urban Evidence: Walking, Visibility and Comparative Fieldwork (Amo Collective Berlin, Sax, Dastoum, Ladouce, Wolff et al.) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Urban evidence begins before measurement, in the encounter between a moving body and a spatial condition. Walking is not merely a means of accessing the field; it is one of the mechanisms by which the field becomes perceptible. Surface, visibility, temperature, edge, density, sound, interruption and social presence are registered through a body that changes pace, direction, attention and posture as it moves. The city therefore does not present itself as a stable object waiting to be surveyed. It unfolds sequentially, through partial views, resistances, invitations and thresholds. Ladouce and Gillebert make this relation measurable at the scale of gaze and gait, showing that uneven surfaces systematically redirect visual attention and alter locomotion. Dastoum, Askarizad and Garau demonstrate that pedestrian life depends not simply on amenity or integration but on visual permeability, sightlines and the relation between a public space and its approaches. 

Neighbourhood Capacity: Attachment, Wellbeing and the Restorative Intelligence of Urban Environments (Wendelboe-Nelson, Wong, Heilmann, Zahnow, Eng, Lei, Stevens) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Neighbourhoods act on wellbeing through capacities distributed across social relations, material form, habitual movement and the meanings attached to everyday places. This makes the neighbourhood neither a passive container nor a simple exposure variable. It is an environment whose effects emerge through use, recognition, accessibility, sociality and the possibility of forming durable relations with people and settings. Charlotte Wendelboe-Nelson and colleagues demonstrate this in their mixed-methods evaluation of outdoor health interventions for refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers. Walking and cycling in outdoor environments produced benefits that standard wellbeing scales only partially captured, while qualitative work revealed the social component of shared activity as critical. 

Socioplastics proposes that the city is not merely a physical arrangement of streets, buildings and infrastructures, but a mutable field of flows, interruptions, memories and thresholds. Its central premise is simple yet radical: urban life is produced through movements of people, care, energy, attention, vulnerability, waiting, access and exclusion. A station, a courtyard, a derelict factory or a housing block is therefore never only an object; it is a behavioural condenser, a social archive and a spatial machine.

This approach emerges from architectural practice, urban observation, public pedagogy, photographic analysis, landscape reading and open-access knowledge construction, developed through LAPIEZA-LAB and the long-term research framework of Socioplastics. Rather than treating mobility as transport alone, Socioplastics reads it as a civic metabolism: the way bodies, routines and territories adapt when systems fail, accelerate, exclude or reorganise. Projects such as Trole Building in Madrid, El Palmeral in Málaga, Green City Parameters, LAPIEZA-LAB and the Socioplastics corpus show how spatial research can connect built transformation, public memory, environmental perception and conceptual cartography into one operative method. The case is therefore not institutional but intellectual: Socioplastics becomes a portable engine for reading contemporary urban reality, where resilience is not only technical recovery but the capacity of a place to remain legible, accessible and collectively inhabitable under pressure. Its conclusion is clear: the future city must be understood as an archive in motion, and design must learn to map not only space, but the fragile choreography of life itself.

A Star by the Sea

Emerging from the littoral terrain like a tectonic outcrop rather than an imposed object, this project advances a singular proposition: that architecture can operate as topography, transforming built form into a performative extension of the coastal landscape. The star-shaped plan, inscribed into the sandy promontory, rejects vertical monumentality in favour of horizontal diffusion, thereby privileging continuity over contrast. Its timber-clad planes fold and taper into the earth, generating inhabitable voids that oscillate between enclosure and exposure, while vegetated courtyards carve luminous apertures within the mass. Such an approach exemplifies biomorphic abstraction, not as aesthetic mimicry but as environmental strategy: the building’s low profile mitigates wind impact, its earth-sheltered envelopes stabilise thermal fluctuations, and its radial geometry orchestrates multidirectional vistas towards sea and sky. Illustratively, the central concavity functions as both climatic moderator and social condenser, fostering communal convergence without forfeiting intimacy. As a case study in critical regionalism, the intervention synthesises material tactility, climatic intelligence, and geomorphological sensitivity; it neither dominates the shoreline nor recedes into invisibility, but establishes a calibrated reciprocity with its maritime context. Ultimately, the project posits a redefinition of monumentality: not as vertical assertion, but as immersive horizontality, wherein the building becomes a habitable landform—a star inscribed upon the earth, legible less as object than as ecological constellation.

Roof as Civic Horizon

The intervention at the Gruž Market in Dubrovnik constitutes an architectural meditation on the coexistence of historical memory and contemporary infrastructure, situated within an enclave defined by the proximity of a Renaissance palace and the urban dynamism of the bay. The project transcends mere functional reorganisation of commercial stalls, advancing instead a strategy in which the roof becomes both climatic apparatus and civic artefact. Conceived as a sequence of low-profile folded planes, the structure refrains from visual competition with the surrounding heritage, preserving key sightlines towards the palace while establishing a renewed spatial order. The deliberate minimisation of vertical supports not only maximises programmatic flexibility, enabling seasonal and logistical reconfigurations, but also reinforces spatial continuity and pedestrian permeability. Cross-ventilation is ensured through the calibrated separation of roof planes and the open perimeter condition, generating a passive microclimate that mitigates intense summer radiation without severing the visual and atmospheric relationship with the maritime landscape. As a paradigmatic case, the market demonstrates how a lightweight structural system can operate simultaneously as environmental infrastructure, urban framework and respectful architectural gesture, synthesising weather protection, the dignification of local commerce and the consolidation of public space as a quotidian theatre of social exchange within a single, coherent design act.

 

The Architecture of Public Discourse * Ada Louise Huxtable

 

Ada Louise Huxtable, the pioneering American architecture critic and writer, transformed the role of criticism into a powerful tool for public engagement with the built environment, long before architecture became part of everyday media discourse, her incisive essays—first for The New York Times, later for The Wall Street Journal—established an ethics of architectural writing rooted in intellectual rigor, civic awareness, and a deep concern for urban life, awarded the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1970, Huxtable saw architecture not merely as design but as a social contract, a material expression of democratic values and cultural priorities, her critiques were both aesthetic and political, advocating for preservation without nostalgia and opposing the sanitized historicism of faux reconstructions, as captured in her rebuke of superficial urban "revivals" that distort rather than honor history, Huxtable’s work—reflected in publications like Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger and The Unreal America—revealed the tensions between commerce, spectacle, and architectural integrity, her early curatorial work at MoMA and her Fulbright research in Italy grounded her writing in historical depth and global awareness, yet she remained fiercely committed to New York City, documenting its transformations with a blend of passion and precision, her legacy lies not only in the hundreds of essays she published but in the very idea that architecture deserves a place in public dialogue, shaping the way generations have understood buildings as active participants in urban culture, not background objects, she became, in Carter Wiseman’s words, the “conscience” of the architectural profession—uncompromising, eloquent, and enduring.

Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture criticism, urban preservation, public space, design ethics, MoMA, Penn Station, Pulitzer Prize, New York architecture, cultural heritage

The NTNU Architecture Masters Series (2019)

Directed by Fredrik Lund in dialogue with Anto y Paula Lloveras, reconfigures the academic field trip into a situated artistic practice where the pedagogical act unfolds within the symbolic and material layers of Málaga, understood here not as a passive urban object but as a living stratigraphy of historical tensions, tourist economies and spatial discontinuities; this experimental programme, embedded in the ethos of Socioplastics, repositions the student as an active decoder of urban semiotics, engaging with the port area through a week-long intensive that treats design as a performative act and critique as embodied research; from the vernacular textures of the traditional barrios to the sterile interfaces of the redeveloped waterfront, and through critical excursions to Granada and Córdoba, the itinerary is less about architectural form than about urban atmospheres, exploring how public space, local rituals and ephemeral rhythms inform design thinking; drawing on the "States of Vigil" explored in Lloveras’s Urbanas, the workshop performs architecture as a cultural ecology, where gastronomy, museum circuits and beach life become civic agents; the final intervention at the port acts as a testbed for the theory of cross-pollination, where students operate as “situational fixers”, imagining minimal yet subversive insertions that reconcile the industrial logic of the harbour with the affective scale of the city; through its integration with the LAPIEZA platform and its porous relationship to both academia and artistic practice, this pedagogical model dissolves the binary between learning and making, theory and affect, positioning the architectural project as a social sculpture in real time; for Lloveras, this is part of a broader project of intellectual barbecho, a fallow methodology that seeks not to impose form but to cultivate radical presence through encounter, memory and mutual transformation.

Ritual infrastructures in the socioplastic field

ARTNATIONS, developed by Anto Lloveras between 2016 and 2018 as a satellite phase of the LAPIEZA Relational Art Series, constitutes a critical experiment in transnational curating and symbolic sovereignty, reimagining art as a borderless nation of collaborative, ephemeral gestures embedded in public life; drawing from the logic of socioplastics, this phase privileged unstable installations, portable rituals, and context-sensitive performances involving everyday objects—lemons, blue bags, briefcases, fish, jeans—that traversed markets, cities, and galleries to activate relational meaning and communal reflection across locations such as Madrid, Marseille, Kikinda, Poreč, and Zagreb; central pieces like Lemon Kiss, Fish Dish Ritual, The City as Readymade, or Blue Sculpture redefined sculpture as processual code, emphasizing translation, instability, and ritual repetition over monumental form; through approximately 100 works in the 1001–1100 range, ARTNATIONS generated a distributed network of symbolic action, operating within existing spaces (galleries, markets, sidewalks) but refusing the logic of display, favoring circulation, context, and care as core curatorial devices; deeply intertwined with this ethos is the long-term MEAT Series (2010–2025), a 15-year sculptural investigation into urban matter, infrastructural exposure, and minimal cuts, where Lloveras intervenes in public furniture—chairs, benches, signs—removing “flesh” to reveal latent tensions within the built environment; each intervention is simultaneously precise and precarious, accumulating into a dispersed archive of wounds, aligning with socioplastics’ focus on fragility, repetition, and public consciousness; rather than presenting autonomous works, both ARTNATIONS and MEAT operate as living protocols—each action a node in a planetary system of ritualized art practice, grounded in care, situated knowledge, and the persistent questioning of authorship, value, and institutional power. (Lloveras, A. 2010–2025) - Access archives at antolloveras.blogspot.com

TAXIDERMY installation CUTS in the MEAT Series

Within the long-form conceptual project MEAT — Unstable Installation Series, Taxidermy emerges as a critical phase that explores the symbolic preservation of urban matter through precise, subtractive interventions—a single, ritualistic cut made to a public object, transforming it from functional infrastructure into a sculptural relic of the everyday; with key works in London, Marseille, and Croatia, this line of the series reflects Anto Lloveras’s socioplastic methodology, where the city is approached as a living, vulnerable body, and each cut becomes a gesture of both rupture and care, exposing the “flesh” beneath chairs, benches, signs, or sofas while questioning what should be remembered, removed, or reactivated; unlike traditional taxidermy, these interventions do not preserve the whole, but rather extract minimal fragments—corners, panels, cross-sections—which are then archived and exhibited as material residues of social life, documented meticulously through photos, field notes, and video; these relics often appear in unstable installations, precariously positioned or reinserted into public space, resisting the closure of the white cube; Taxidermy aligns with recurring MEAT themes: palindrome (symmetry), ellipsis (omission), and compression (reduction), transforming disappearance into form; first formalized with intervention #100 in London, the Taxidermy phase extended into Croatia with a solo show at Gallery Rigo (2017), where these subtracted objects were shown in dialogue with their urban origins; together, these works constitute a forensic poetics of the city, in which fragility, trace, and absence function as both method and message, reconfiguring public space as a mutable archive of collective memory and silent resistance. (Lloveras, A. 2010–2025) Explore Taxidermy and the MEAT Series at antolloveras.blogspot.com

HIDDEN FORCES:::::::::::::::::::NO TAG_________________SUPREMATISM AND DUNES_____________________ CÁDIZ 2019

Along the windswept periphery of Cádiz, an ordinary beach barrier becomes the site of a discreet yet poetic intervention, where a black identification tag is carefully removed, revealing instead a white monochrome that resonates with the tonal palette of the surrounding sand and sea mist, subtly merging the sculptural object into the larger coastal tableau. This gesture, minimalist in form yet conceptually dense, operates within the logic of hidden works, those that do not impose but instead recede into the environment, altering it through near-invisibility rather than spectacle. As a fleeting manifestation of Suprematism in the dunes, the altered barrier proposes a radical rethinking of public space aesthetics, where utility yields to quiet abstraction and signage becomes silence. This act, seemingly minor, challenges the ubiquity of functional signage by turning it into an unannounced artwork, a monochromatic fragment of a larger, unseen composition that stretches across the coastal scape. Echoing the lineage of non-objective art, the work privileges sensation over message, offering a contemplative loop in which form and context coalesce. Captured in a 60-second video loop, exhibited at LAPIEZA GALLERY, this piece is not only a film but a site-specific meditation, anchored in the supernatural atmosphere of Cádiz, where dunes act as a canvas and the wind becomes a collaborator. The viewer is invited not just to see but to sense the shift—an ephemeral artwork that leaves behind no plaque, only a pause in the landscape, an environmental punctuation that briefly renders the everyday extraordinary.

Make a better environment. 
The black tag is removed, generating a pleasant white rectangle instead. 
Suprematism in the dunes. 

FILM 60 SECONDS LOOP. HD VIDEO. LAPIEZA GALLERY. 
CÁDIZ SUPERNATURAL.

MMXIX

The Experience of the City: Public Space, Nature and the Right to Urban Meaning

The Experience of the City: Public Spaces, Housing and Urban Nature is a multidisciplinary course hosted by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, aimed at addressing the challenges and complexities of contemporary public space. The programme critiques how urban environments are often planned using strictly technical parameters, neglecting the social perception, symbolic value and ecological potential of shared spaces. These oversights result in dysfunction: spaces designed to foster interaction and citizenship instead become socially sterile or conflictive, severed from the everyday lives of their users. Through the participation of architects, environmental psychologists, geographers, and biologists, the course unpacks how elements such as vegetation, morphology and collective memory shape public space. The debate encompasses issues like the unequal distribution of green areas, the symbolic poverty of certain urban landscapes, and the tension between infrastructure and emotion. Contributors such as José Antonio Corraliza, Enric Pol, and Agustín Hernández Aja provide critical insights into urban green as more than decoration —as a vehicle for identity, affect, and sustainability. Anto Lloveras introduces the notion of SOCIOPLASTICS to interpret relational art within the urban realm, inviting a rethinking of public space as a performative and epistemic field. The course ultimately argues that reclaiming urban nature and rehumanising public infrastructures is essential not only for environmental reasons, but for restoring urban dignity —the right to inhabit, participate in, and make sense of the city.

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2024. The Experience of the City: Public Spaces, Housing and Urban Nature [humanities course]. 16 Nov–2 Dec 2024. Oficina de Actividades Culturales, UAM.

The experience of the city: public spaces, housing and urban nature ////////// La experiencia de la ciudad: espacios públicos, vivienda y naturaleza urbana____curso de humanidades UAM URBANAS

– José Antonio Corraliza, environmental psychologist, stresses the urgent need to recover meaning in the design of public space, arguing that "urban green must go beyond decoration—it's about turning concrete into something that beats."
– Josep Selga, biologist, remarks on the unnoticed structural role of urban trees: "We’ve grown so used to them that we overlook their power to shape the essence of the city—do we want a city to live in, or one to escape from?"
– Javier Ruiz, architect, defends the communicative nature of public space: "It's the only place where communication unfolds in its most random and vital form. Cities must be imperfect to remain alive; we must resist singular solutions."
– Pedro Molina, geographer, draws attention to marginal green areas: "Small, overlooked lots act as micro-reservoirs of naturalness and should be protected as urban landscape archives."
– Mariano Sánchez, horticulturist at Madrid’s Botanical Garden, underscores that "emotional well-being in green spaces depends not just on design, but on plant quality, genetic integrity, and acoustic comfort."
– Enric Pol, environmental psychologist, highlights structural barriers to sustainable behaviour: "Citizens may wish to act sustainably, but urban dynamics often prevent them. Anchoring sustainability in collective identity is key."
– Enrique Bardají, architect, proposes a reading of public space through typology and urban morphology: "Understanding these patterns can guide the regeneration of old cities and the design of new ones."
– Salvador Rueda, biologist and environmental psychologist, offers a radical urban model: "By liberating the interior of the urban block from traffic, we restore the citizen’s full spatial status."
– Agustín Hernández Aja, architect, critiques the symbolic void of many urban designs: "We’ve created spaces that lack the character or meaning needed for citizens to identify with them. Appropriation is essential—for example, Dehesa de la Villa in Madrid."

The urban spaces, their design and the planning of their use, are subject to an intense public debate that affects both the new urban spaces in non-consolidated areas and the public spaces inserted in consolidated urban networks. This debate refers to the location and location of public spaces, such as the design, equipment and productivity of such spaces. Frequently, the planning of these spaces is done with strictly technical criteria without taking into account the social perception and the use that is made of public spaces. The result is that such spaces designed to be meeting places, crossroads and promoters of social interaction end up becoming unproductive scenarios (ghettos) when not on platforms where irresolvable social conflicts are expressed. The reasons for these imbalances are very varied, ranging from processes of refunctionalization of public spaces, to changes in the typology of users and their demands, including the fact that, in fact, there are inadequacies in the location, design and equipment of the spaces. This course aims to contribute to the debate on urban public spaces, emphasizing the presence of natural elements and the impact that these elements can have on human well-being. For this, it is intended to bring together specialists from different branches (architecture, urban planning, geography, gardening, environmental psychology, etc.) in order to evaluate and make proposals for the improvement of the quality of public spaces, which is a way of make the city more alive and friendly.

Anto Lloveras is an architect, artist and curator based in Madrid, and the director of LAPIEZA, a platform for experimental contemporary art. He trained in architecture at ETSAM (Madrid) and the Delft University of Technology, and has taught in architectural studios and seminars at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Universidad Rey Juan Carlos III (Madrid). His current research explores the intersection of philosophical hermeneutics and SOCIOPLASTICS, a conceptual device he develops to analyse the epistemological and narrative structures underpinning relational artistic practices.

PREFERENCE, RESTORATIVENESS AND PERCEIVED ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY OF SMALL URBAN SPACES ///////////////////////////////// CONGRESS LISBOA PORTUGAL ::::::::::::

Understanding the psychological and ecological functions of small urban green spaces is critical in contemporary city planning, particularly within highly built environments such as central Madrid. This study, carried out across nine urban squares with 537 participants, reveals the extent to which preference, perceived quality, and environmental restoration intersect within the microcosm of pocket parks. By applying validated psychometric tools—such as the Perceived Restorativeness Scale, Environmental Quality Scale, and Vegetation Scale—researchers capture nuanced layers of subjective experience tied to these spaces. Key findings highlight that time spent in these areas correlates strongly with perceived restorativeness, reinforcing Kaplan’s theory of accumulative micro-restoration. Notably, vegetation density, perceived safety, and social interaction emerged as central predictors of a square’s restorative value. These micro-ecosystems not only offer environmental services but play a crucial role in urban health equity, especially in socioeconomically diverse populations. The results advocate for a strategic reimagining of urban design—emphasizing quality over quantity—wherein even the smallest green nodes are equipped with vegetal richness, functional infrastructure, and social affordances. In this light, small squares become more than aesthetic amenities; they function as critical public health assets, catalyzing mental restoration through passive and active engagement. As urbanization intensifies, these findings push for policy frameworks that embed mental well-being into green infrastructure planning, especially in dense metropolitan cores.

                  

ONGOING RESEARCH 
URBAN GREEN AREAS IN THE CENTER OF THE CITY OF MADRID

> ENVIRONMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY / URBANISM / ART

http://psicologiaambientalhoy.blogspot.com.es